A Love Letter to Analog Dinners
Published:
A few years ago, my brain broke.
My phone had been not-so-delicately nudging me like a worried grandparent – grunting belligerently in all-caps, and occasionally deciding to unalive itself – that I had been spending upwards of ten hours each day dissecting comment sections, making wild inferences over strangers’ opinions on sandwiches I’d never tasted, and analyzing ripostes to Keith Lee’s TikToks.
A classic case of chronic device fatigue, yes, which only got stranger when I visited my favorite restaurants, long my preferred sanctuary in times of heightened anxiety.
Between sliding into a familiar two-top and ordering, a rush of second guesses hit me. I wondered if they were still offering the special that a friend had posted the other day? Also, was the executive chef in, and would it come across as needy if I tagged them in my Instagram story later that afternoon?
Later, I decided to call time on social media while restricting how much I used my smartphone. I mourned the intrusiveness of social media on my everyday life and wanted – needed – something simpler. So, I went analog.
Love Letters
I recently agreed to meet a friend for lunch in Islington, at a new-ish restaurant that was serving Japanese pub food. We ate, drank, and fretted over the minutiae of each other’s’ lives like Olympia Dukakis and Cher in Moonstruck, grabbing greedy mouthfuls of fried pork cutlets and hamburger steaks between sentences while the sun cast a steady glow on the Kentish Town Road outside.
My friend had a fresh new cut and had just had her nails done, and when our waiter – the owner – complimented her, she beamed like someone had offered her a year’s worth of free hot dogs. When our dishes were cleared, he blushed when we saw that we had cleaned our plates (I had practically licked the demi-glace from mine) and I glanced over to the kitchen, where the chef had a smile that radiated and filled the room from the inside out.
I’m not sure that I would have appreciated the quiet momentousness of those details if I had been busy agonizing over taking a video or asking my friend for a cut-through of her lunch so I could post it to my stories later.
And I’m not sure I would have appreciated the expressions of unadulterated delight on the faces of loved ones when a whole seabass, perfectly steamed and drizzled with sizzling hot oil, arrived at the table at our favorite Cantonese restaurant a few weeks ago; the conversations that have been able to reach a satisfying endpoint by virtue of not being interrupted by the person who insists on dragging a plate of parmesan gougères into the ‘good light’; and the fact that, as my spouse bluntly pointed out, that my orders are now entirely driven by what I actually want to eat, versus what I think I should order.
When you spend more time in a favorite restaurant’s tagged gallery and menu pages than even their own staff, then the relationship quickly veers into the parasocial. And viewing anything through a filter – whether that’s through the lens of your phone’s camera or the performance of having dinner – doesn’t just erect barriers to enjoying what’s surely one of the greatest pleasures in life, it also distorts the humanity from the basic acts of kindness that define the pleasure of eating out. And who wants that?
***
These days, dining out is simpler, and mostly dictated without outside influence, which sounds absurd, but the power of the algorithm is like a gravitational force you don’t realize dictates so much of your unconscious decision-making until you wriggle free from its clutches.
I think about being in college, of going to concerts before the arrival of smartphones, of being entirely in the moment. I recall my friend’s father taking us out for a fancy dinner on Park Lane and trying black cod and wagyu for the first time, and how vividly those memories feel in the absence of the noise around them. And I appreciate the gift of being able to make new memories that foreground the moment and the company I’m with, and not how the experience could be perceived.
No second guesses.
David Paw is Resy’s senior editor.
